The Connecticut Prison Association and the Search for Reformatory Justice. Gordon S. Bates
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connected to the forces giving birth to the Social Gospel. We turn now to other social forces, equally powerful in their influences on the cultural context of 1875.
IMMIGRATION, EMANCIPATION, AND URBANIZATION
The impacts of the changes wrought by the American Civil War on America’s regional cultures were enormous. Three factors particularly stand out in connection to criminal justice. They were the end of plantation slavery, unprecedented waves of immigration from Europe, and the subsequent urbanization that took place in every state of the Union—including Connecticut. The America that was hailed as a land of economic opportunity and second chances also became in the twentieth century a nation deeply divided by racism, budding nationalism, and a widespread fear of crime.
The aftermath of the Civil War left Connecticut unscathed in terms of military battles but vastly different in terms of the economic and sociological impact of the war on the region. The two decades following its end were harsh. A new urban situation was developing in those years that caused everyone a good deal of anxiety. As historian Robert Owen Decker writes, “The 1870s were terrible years, as a great depression came in 1873 and six years of hardship followed. Large numbers of unemployed walked. They worried the Hartford police. Men and women took to the roads in large numbers, and many rough gangs were organized. Not until 1880 did the economic upswing come.”42
It was certainly the case that the state and the rest of the Northeast were at the very beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. It was also true that the Civil War had provided an economic platform on which merchants in virtually every industry could transform their wartime factories to produce goods not only for their own states and regions but also for the burgeoning settlements between the Mississippi and the Pacific. Historian Howard Zinn reminds his readers that for the remainder of the century after the Civil War, new sources of energy and power transformed American life and the cultural environment. Human muscles were replaced by steam engines and electricity, wood by iron, and then iron by steel: “Machines could now drive steel tools. Oil could lubricate machines and light homes, streets and factories…. By 1900, America was traversed by 193,000 miles of railroad. The telephone, the typewriter and the adding machine speeded up the work of business.”43
At the same time, city populations in particular were expanding, due primarily to immigration. That brought new issues and opportunities for society to face. Connecticut’s business leaders were priming themselves to participate fully. For example, the manufacture of woolen items and the publishing of books and magazines had been the dominant Connecticut enterprises before the Civil War, along with an industry that most people don’t associate with Connecticut, the making of brandy and gin.
The prevalence of the liquor trade had prompted the formation of the Connecticut Temperance Society in 1829, but despite the plethora of sermons and public outcries about the availability and detriments of alcohol, Hartford still had 114 distilleries in 1845 that produced more than seventy-five thousand gallons of cider brandy and over three hundred thousand gallons of gin. Dealing with the effects of “Demon Rum” would figure prominently in the work of the CPA then and in every succeeding generation.44
After the war other forms of manufacturing were created and rapidly expanded, including silk textiles, firearms, leather works, and machine tools. Eventually, the industry arose that became the icon of Hartford and Connecticut: the insurance industry. The Aetna and the Hartford insurance companies, initiating a brand new fire-insurance concept, rose to prominence in the 1880s and were joined by the end of the century by other companies to provide insurance not only to businesses but to individuals for a variety of potential threats and disasters.
Economically, Connecticut was on an upward curve for the decade of 1865–75. Its prosperity matched the advances of other business tycoons all along the East Coast. While the citizenry at the bottom of the economic ladder were struggling to survive, those at the top were raking in millions of dollars and living in such lavish style that the period merited its nickname as the Gilded Age. Mark Twain used the characterization to his advantage in a play that was very successful despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that it mocked those at the top of the ladder. In particular, the Northeast industrial development exploded. In the words of one historian, “A greedy, grasping, materialistic quality characterized the age…. The democratic process began to falter as the Northeast, with its industry, its cities, and its financial developments caught step with the rest of the modern age…. Economic nationalism had become a fact.”45
Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 generated another massive cultural shift of the antebellum period. The official end of slavery is generally considered to be his greatest moral legacy to the nation, and it affected every part of the nation. The declaration of emancipation brought about a political realignment that led to a division between slave and free states, which in turn precipitated a retributive political Reconstruction effort that did more harm than good. An exodus of former slaves was set in motion to the northern states, primarily to the urban centers.
Connecticut abolished slavery by law in 1849, the last of the New England states to do so. Racist attitudes were as deeply engrained in the northern states as in the South, despite the persuasive power of the abolitionist movement. The linkage in the nineteenth century between the slave trade and Connecticut’s own burgeoning economy and institutions of higher education has been firmly established. Indeed, much of the philanthropy of the twentieth century was made possible by the profits derived in the preceding centuries from slavery. The sweat and blood of black men and women and their children made the industrial as well as the agricultural revolution possible. Their release from their enslavement gave them only a brief period to celebrate.
According to John von Rohr, in Connecticut, as in much of New England, the ownership model used to hold and treat slaves was based on Old Testament scripture. In it, a person who in most of the South was called and treated as a “slave” was euphemistically and legally treated as a member of the family and called a “servant” in the North. The change in terminology also led to an ambiguous status. Servants lived in a limbo somewhere between the conditions faced by a plantation slave and those faced by an indentured servant. Although usually freed after a specified time, freedom proved to be no favor in reality, as northern cultural prejudices against black people found more subtle ways to hold them down financially and socially. “Paradoxically,” claims von Rohr, emancipation in New England was more oppressive than bondage, pointing toward later discriminatory practices.46
The data available in annual reports throughout the early years of the CPA does not include any breakdown of offender populations in the county jails and the state prison in terms of race. There is evidence, however, that people of color were already disproportionately represented in the jails and prison and resented by many in the general population, especially after the Civil War.47
To complete our survey of the years after the Civil War, a singular cultural shock to the nation was caused by the successive waves of immigrants that moved into the country. Between 1840 and 1860, according to census reports, over 4.3 million persons of all ages from overseas took up residence in the United States. With the influx large cities became huge, and small towns became cities. All told, between 1820 and 1900, over 19 million immigrants settled across the land, and by 1880 one quarter of the total population in the nation lived in cities of over 8,000 people.48
Connecticut’s census increased by over 150,000 people in the thirty years prior to 1860, and the urban population of the state went up by 197 percent between 1820 and 1860. The percentage of foreign born in the state increased from 21 percent in 1870 to 30 percent by 1910. The result was a steep rise in pressure on the immigrant population to learn the language, find jobs and housing, and fit into the new culture. Conversely, the cities were hard-pressed to provide work and places for immigrants to live and to keep law and order in the streets. The time was ripe for all kinds of discrimination.
After the Civil War, coincident and interrelated with all these changes, crime increased. Especially in the cities, crime grew both in the varieties of offenses and in the breadth of ages of the offenders. The most prominent criminal offenses requiring imprisonment were drunkenness, pauperism, and vagrancy, with a few cases of assault and battery and an occasional